Common Decency, your second novel, is just out in Penguin paperback. What’s it about?
It’s ostensibly a kind of “odd couple” novel, but one in which the couple don’t really know one another and they aren’t actually that different. Lily and Siobhán are two women in their 20s, living in the same block of flats off of Botanic Avenue in Belfast. Lily has recently lost her mother and is trapped in an increasingly solipsistic, deleterious spiral of grief and fury, while Siobhán is having her sense of self eroded by an all-consuming relationship with an older, married academic. Both women are at a nadir – they’re struggling to gain any perspective beyond their own claustrophobic misery. After a chance encounter, Lily begins to project her need for connection on to Siobhán, but when Siobhán is too self-absorbed to see her, Lily becomes obsessed with exerting any kind influence, with slightly strange results.
To what extent is it a lockdown novel, and a critique of late capitalism?
I wrote the first draft while living alone in Belfast, during lockdown, so the gradual winnowing of both protagonists’ social and emotional worlds was definitely heavily influenced by the context in which it was written. Re the critique element: it’s very beneficial to the persistence of late capitalism that we stay selfish, that we prioritise the spurious notion of our own individuality, and of the needs of that individuality. As long as capitalism renders our lives financially precarious, the more we’ll struggle to conjure empathy for lives distinct from our own. The novel is an attempt to explore the limits and failures of that approach. The fight to maintain empathy for the “other” is all that will invest our existences with meaning, but more than that, it’s the only thing that will save us from extinction.
It began life as two novellas. How did they merge?
The setting allowed me to merge them – the very specific and familiar biome of South Belfast meant I could weave these two insular worlds together with permeable social membrane. The host of shared encounters and deuteragonists helped make it a novel.
Your debut coming-of-age novel, Tennis Lessons, was praised highly in The Irish Times, not least for its second-person voice. Did that feel high-risk?
I wrote it at a time when I had no insight into the maelstrom of literary publishing – it didn’t feel like a risk because I didn’t know that it might be a risk. That said, I couldn’t have written that novel in other form, so even if I’d understood just how much people don’t like second-person novels, I still wouldn’t have had a choice. It wasn’t a risk because there was no less risky course of action available to me.
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Both your novels are set in Northern Ireland, without the setting dominating. When writing about individuals, how conscious are you of exploring society as a whole?
I love writing characters that reveal the ideological failures of society at a granular level – Siobhán and Lily aren’t opposites, they’re just two parts of one neoliberal ideology. I get really bugged about how the North is discursively infantilised: its problems are spoken about as though they aren’t a product of the same problems that affect every other populace. I try to write the specificity of home, while also situating its specificity within wider economic phenomena.
You’ve criticised reviewing culture for its reductive comparison of female authors. Can you enlarge on that and how would you like to see it change?
I guess review culture often has to take a lot of its cues from the marketing departments of publishers who rely upon comparisons as a way to sell books. I understand why it’s necessary but I wish there was more space offered for critics to engage more fully with works on their own terms.
“I write poetry because I love what language can do. I write prose because I hate myself.” Can you enlarge on how the two forms differs? And why the self-loathing?
Poetry is an opportunity to try and explode the boundaries of how we engage or approach language at a primordial level, whereas prose, as a form more beholden to capital (in that it can actually make its practitioners some money), has different rules – I use prose to interrogate my own humanity, so it becomes an engine for exploring the logical conclusions to most nasty impulses. I’m pretty sure my creative impulses are just one side of a coin; the other side of which is an undiagnosed personality disorder. It’s not all self-loathing though – has nobody noticed yet that I oscillate between being the most sagacious, loveable angel the world has ever seen, and the most macerated, repulsive, swamp-dwelling scum bucket?
You described the best reading experience as being one where the text colludes with you but also bothers and reshapes you. Tell me more.
I love work that challenges and resituates how you think about your place and responsibility within the world, but for it do that, it needs to invite you in first.
Congratulations on being shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection for Isdal (Picador, September), “a timely interrogation of the true crime genre”. Can you expand on its themes and style?
Thanks! The collection starts with a pastiche of a true crime podcast, satirising the seedy and mercenary tropes of the genre. Then, there’s a lyric essay trying to figure out why true crime appeals to us, and what failures of conscience and kindness are necessary to its production and success. Finally, there’s a sequence of poems written about the young girl who found the Isdal Woman’s body, centred around the longevity and lasting impacts of trauma and gendered violence.
What projects are you working on?
I’m writing a new novel – it’s like nothing I’ve ever done before and I’m having so much fun. It’s potentially unreadable, but we’ll deal with that later.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
I’m a bit sedentary – my most dramatic pilgrimages are to Gregg’s.
Who do you admire the most?
Judith Butler is pretty great.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
We’re raising inheritance tax, baby!
What current book, film and podcast would you recommend?
The Night of the 12th, a French film directed by Dominik Moll, is a beautiful, awful, nuanced subversion of true crime.
Which public event affected you most?
I could say something serious here, but a quick-fire Q&A maybe isn’t the place, so I’m going to settle for the Armie Hammer cannibalism scandal of 2021.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
I hate to be a Musée D’Orsay simp, but probably the Musée D’Orsay.
Your most treasured possession?
We’ve got a beautiful Philodendron in our front room. I love him.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
I’ve got a first edition of The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi, which I read about eight times when I was in a teenager. Not only is the book beautiful, but the cover is amazing.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
Are the dead writers reanimated in this scenario? Or am I just pouring stroganoff into Cervantes’ skull?
The best and worst things about where you live?
I live next door to a football stadium called the Mozzarella Fellas Stadium.
What is your favourite quotation?
“I am not a poet, Sonya / I want to live in your hair” – from Of Weddings Before the War by Ilya Kaminsky.
Who is your favourite fictional character?
Bazarov, from Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, is a hottie.
A book to make me laugh?
The Country Life by Rachel Cusk.
A book that might move me to tears?
Dub: Finding Ceremony by Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
